The Evolution and Changing Role of The Music Video From 1900, and its likely Development in The Future.

Music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music, most commonly a song. It was primarily used to promote the sale of music recordings. It represents a very important part of the music industry, it have become a venue where music artist is given a chance to impress the public not just with their vocal talent but also with their looks or moves.

Music video can be described as a visual aid to what is going on in the song. But before all this visual moving images that are used to emphasise the song itself, the songs have to be play. In 1900, Edison invents the gramophone in the USA. It was a first shift from music as a solely live and audiovisual experience to recorded audio on various forms of disc. The first ever ‘music video’ is experimented by Fischinger with sound/vision synchronisation called Komposition in Blau. It was made in Berlin and was actually made to be presented as an art.

The defining work in the development of the modern music video was the ‘The Beatles’ first major motion picture. ‘A hard day’s night’ in 1964. The music segments in this film arguably set out the basic visual vocabulary of today’s music videos, influencing a vast number of contemporary musicians, and countless subsequent pop and rock music videos.

In the 1980’s, MTV is launched, the first aired is Buggles ‘Video killed the Radio Star’. In the early mid 1980’s, artists started to use more sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a storyline or plot to the music video. Michael Jackson was the first artist to create the concept of the short film, a music video that has a beginning, middle and end. Music videos, by the mid-1980, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing.

MTV is the start of a ‘golden era’ of music videos and the unparalleled success of a new art form in popular culture. As the technology keeps getting more advanced, music video now approach the popularity of the songs themselves, being sold in collections on video tape and DVD. This is essential for artists to promote themselves where and whenever possible, not just to draw more attention to themselves but because a lot of money can be generated for the artist by doing this. DVD are necessary because it is offering music video’s which offers visual entertainment to the audience and it also generates more profit than a normal album (CD) would.

The introduction of internet in 2001 is slowly taking over the era of MTV and DVD. The music video can simply be uploaded on to any social network then be viewed by the audiences worldwide such as Youtube, Facebook, Bebo and etc. The most popular video-sharing website is ‘Youtube’, which is a website allows users to upload, view and share videos, and it makes use of different technologies to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video.

Music video are still necessary these days but are much easier to search and watch the artist that you are interested to online on various websites instead of having to watch other artists as well. More viewers mean more popularity and because of this a lot of artists make videos that are either good or bad just so that the audience has something to visually remember about the video, give them something to talk about and thus promoting it. Other than all of that, there are also different forms of gadget that allows us to watch music videos online such as, Ipod touch, phone, tablets and etc.

From the birth of MTV to the rise of online video to a video iPod, music video remains a crucial part of the label marketing mix. Music industry has changed, the way fans are interacting has changed, but the way we consume music videos hasn’t for the most part but what I think music video are missing is the lack of interactivity. It would extend the art form of music video production and interact with fans in a way that is obviously successful in all other aspects of online interactions with them. Interactivity is offering viewers an enhanced experience by allowing them to actively participate in the video. For example, Kilo by Light. The video tracks and records every viewer’s cursor, which is then composite into future versions. It seems to generate a sense of community between the fans and the other cursors.

However, at times the interactive elements can take away from the enjoyment of the track as a whole. The different elements of interactive music videos need to be balanced for them to work cohesively; and they won’t simply be able to rely on gimmicks. There are other ideas to create interactivity like ‘shop-able videos’, allow people go directly to the online stores and the combination with Google chrome (map) and even different TV channels inspired by Bob Dylan’s 2013 video. Interactivity will definitely be the key element for the future music video ‘must have’ and will continue to develop that way. Recently, I have also seen music video that is Instagram-based. A combination of social network, still image and moving image is quite unusual. Again, this kind of concept is very rare and has added some interactivity element into it.

A host of interactive music videos have lip-syncing in common; it works as a narrative device. In an online medium, this feels incredibly inclusive: any one of us could film ourselves mouthing the words to a song, uploading it to YouTube and becoming a bit part in the video. There is also an idea of using video games as music video. The interactivity is most apparent as audiences are able to play as a protagonist whose achievements become their own, even though they are replicated by anyone else who plays the game, so they would’ve felt like they just played the game. Perhaps the future of music videos is in authoring more inclusive pieces of art but will definitely be interact-able.